Constructing the Heritage Archive of Orature in Non-Scripted Languages

           

How do we document and preserve the expression of orature (oral literature) in contemporary non-scripted languages? What does “documentation” involve when the modes of expression and performance of the language are beyond the reach of writing as a technology, and are transmitted through individual and collective memory?

These are some of the key questions and concerns at the centre of the project on Constructing the Heritage Archive of Orature in Non-Scripted Languages. The project will develop through a series of workshops, conferences and other forms of encounters within the collaboration between the AILC-ICLA and the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. This collaboration offers an ideal context for our collective effort to retrieve and record human memories of affect, and to examine how script, printing technology, the publication industry, or digital storage can enable, control and represent (or misrepresent) memory.

Preliminary Considerations

Our literary categories are framed by script-based societies, where writing devalues orality and orature as pre-literate forms on their way to progress. However, a script is only one form of forming a community, a sahitatva, of words. Non-script expression occurs within an affective community, and is perceived aesthetically – through the senses. What forms of documentation are appropriate, technically as well as ethically, for this aesthesis? Do the different geographies of plural unscripted languages invite different approaches?

On the one hand, the advent of new media and of digital recording and archiving empowers marginalised communities to have a voice outside the assumption of writing and print as the only available forms of documentation. Digital recording and storage may appear as the most practical solution for the preservation of verbal artistic genres. On the other hand, these technologies are resource-intensive from an environmental perspective and profoundly embedded in corporate technocapitalism that controls access and ownership, as well as the speed with which the digital medium becomes obsolescent, imperilling future retrieval. What advantages or disadvantages might other forms (for example, ‘older’ technologies such as non-digital audio or audio-visual recording; transcription through phonetic alphabets – which requires a form of scripting) offer?

The comparative method is one of willing engagement with difference, and our aim is to assimilate what we learn from orature in non-scripted language communities into the literary, cultural and sociological research paradigms regulating the preservation of memory across the world, and to reflect on how this can expand both critical and pedagogical thinking as a crucial part of the methodology of preservation of memory and heritage.

We have learnt that languages are intersubjective, and that language use within a community is a performative act. While poetic language can be used by the individual privately, in its social dimension it performs an activity for and with an other: in this sense, language is the medium of setting up and performing a relation with a viewer, a listener, an addressee, as well as a reader. As the medium of an intersubjective relation, language is used to form and regulate societies within and without physical boundaries. In a plurilingual non-script milieux, studying how each society organises these affective relations will require flexible and adaptable methodologies that may not be, or may only partially be, transferable across different language cultures, and which need to be interdisciplinary insofar as the expressions can include song, music, performance and dance, as well as words.

Moving away from the script-centred paradigm and relying on insights learned from field research, we are interested in studying different forms of affective language use in performative orature in a plural sociolinguistic context, and to interrogate practices and methodologies of collection and preservation of their memory. Our purpose is, on the one hand, to identify appropriate methodologies; on the other hand, to address the issues of “historical” justice and egalitarian values underpinned by the ethics of listening and affective relations. Language moves with humans across geographies, and historically across genres of performance or use. We endeavour to make audible and visible voices and locations hitherto unheard, unseen, or misrepresented.

Theoretical Framework

To these ends, the project seeks to lay the ground for a theoretical framework that can guide further research, and includes the following parameters:

1. To understand the relation or complementarity (as opposed to hierarchy) between script and non-script societies in a globalised world. This includes the need to break the script vs non script binary, and the valorization and representation of non-script societies within script-based societies, which tend to perceive non-script cultures as “pre-literate” (that is, still on the way to “progress”), or even radically other and “primitive”. Crucially, access and reach of virtual space and/or other methods of documenting and recording by non-script societies are long-term research goals, to avoid the reiteration of hegemonic perspectives whereby the non-script society is the object of study by the technologically advanced culture, rather than the subject of its own knowledge and self-reflection.

2. To identify categories of understanding (including metaphors) that enable us to study the ethics of technologically enhanced aesthesis: this concerns both the ethical issues raised by the technologies used for documentation, and the impact that such documentation has, in turn, on the expression, its affect, and its affective community.

3. To follow the human mind in its function of remembering – to imagine an aesthesis of virtuality based in a pluralistic, democratic ethics of memory. When we employ technological tools to aid memory by preserving it, memory is, at the same time, constructed and shaped by these tools and the ideological frames within which they are developed (for example, notions of advanced vs. primitive or exotic societies). What is the impact of conceptualisations of what data is worthy to be collected (and how) on what is remembered and how it is remembered? As the expression and reception of orature in non-scripted societies rely on the senses (aesthesis), how does the technology employed to record enhance certain sensory effects while eliding others? Can tools be identified, or innovatively devised, to promote inclusiveness? If we want our tools to be “ethical”, what ethical principles do we prioritise, and why?

Tangible Outcomes

The project aims to:

• Connect researchers and well as practitioners working in performance and non-script fields so that a common modus operandi for making, assessing, and using digital resources can evolve, taking the multiplicity and diversity of experiences into account.
• Develop resources that can support the further work of scholars in the field, including a collaborative document / digital handbook; individual papers and/or audio-visual essays / soundscapes.

The first Workshop in this series, “Constructing the Heritage Archive of Orature in Non-Scripted Languages: Theoretical, Technical and Ethical Challenges”, will be held in August 2026, and will be followed by further events.